Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern

Anthony Ian Jack , Jared Parker Friedman, Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis, Scott Nolan Taylor
Published: March 23, 2016

Prior work has established that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in God, whereas religious and spiritual beliefs have been positively linked to social and emotional cognition. However, social and emotional cognition can be subdivided into a number of distinct dimensions, and some work suggests that analytic thinking is in tension with some aspects of social-emotional cognition ... We report eight hypothesis-driven studies ... We find that religious belief is robustly positively associated with moral concern .., and that at least part of the negative association between belief and analytic thinking .. can be explained by a negative correlation between moral concern and analytic thinking ... These findings challenge the theoretical view that religious and spiritual beliefs are linked to the perception of agency, and suggest that gender differences in religious belief can be explained by differences in moral concern. These findings are consistent with the opposing domains hypothesis, according to which brain areas associated with moral concern and analytic thinking are in tension ... We suggest that this structural feature of the brain underlies the long noted anecdotal tension between materialistic and spiritual worldviews ... The neuroimaging findings show there is a constraint on activating both brain networks at the same time. However, tests of empathic concern and of analytic thinking measure people’s ability within specific contexts ...

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149989